World’s first petaflop-capable supercomputer is retired
APR 01, 2013
DOI: 10.1063/PT.5.026889
BBC : The US Department of Energy’s IBM Roadrunner was the first supercomputer to sustain a calculation speed of 1 petaflop, or 10 15 calculations per second. Roadrunner began operation at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) in 2008 and was used for simulations that ranged from virus modeling to nuclear weapons to distant parts of the universe. The supercomputer used 12 000 modified versions of the processor originally designed for Sony’s Playstation 3 videogame console. It used 92 km of fiber optic cable, filled 288 refrigerator-sized cases, and cost $121 million to build. Though Roadrunner was still one of the 25 fastest supercomputers when it shut down on 31 March, DOE built a faster computer at LANL in 2010, and more recent computers have made speed increases to more than 17 petaflops.
© 2013 American Institute of Physics
